The Blue Hammer (26 page)

“They were the man’s wife and son. The second time he came, he brought them to meet my husband.”

“Were they aware that your husband killed the man?”

“I don’t know. I’m not even certain that that’s what happened.”

“But you assumed it.”

“Yes. I had to. I kept waiting to hear from the woman. I hardly slept for weeks. But I never did hear from her. Sometimes I wonder if I imagined the whole thing.”

“The bones Rico dug up aren’t imaginary.”

“I know that. I meant the woman and the little boy.”

“What happened to them?”

“They simply went away—I don’t know where. And I went on with my life as best I could.”

There was self-pity in her voice, but she was watching me in cold surmise. The contours of her body appeared to be aware of me, more in resignation than anything else.

Below the house, the sea thumped and fumbled and slid like a dead man trying clumsily to climb back into life. I shivered. She touched my knee with her tapered fingers.

“Are you cold?”

“I suppose I am.”

“I suppose I could turn on the heat.”

The smile that went with the offer lent it a double meaning, but it was forced.

“I won’t be staying, Mrs. Chantry.”

“I’ll be all alone here.”

She uttered a mock sigh, which ended on a note of genuine desolation. She seemed to be realizing how completely alone she was.

“You’ll be having visitors before long.”

Her hands came together and clenched. “You mean the police, don’t you?”

“You can probably expect Mackendrick in the morning, if not before.”

“I thought you were going to help me,” she said in a small voice.

“I will if you let me. You haven’t told me enough. And some of the things you’ve told me aren’t true.”

She gave me an angry look, but it was calculated and controlled. “I haven’t been lying.”

“Maybe not consciously. When you live a phony life for twenty-five years, it’s possible to get a bit out of touch.”

“Are you telling me I’m out of my mind?”

“More likely you’re simply lying, to yourself as well as me.”

“What did I say that wasn’t true?”

“You said the dead man was an old army friend of your husband’s. I happen to know that Chantry was never in the army. That one discrepancy casts doubt on your whole story.”

She flushed and bit her lower lip and looked at me like a thief. “I was just talking loosely. I meant that the dead man had been in the army at the time they met. But of course Richard wasn’t.”

“Do you want to make some other corrections in your account?”

“If you’ll tell me where I went wrong.”

A spurt of anger went through me. “It isn’t so funny, Mrs. Chantry. Several people have been killed. Others are in danger.”

“Not from me. I’ve never injured anyone in my life.”

“You’ve stood by and let it happen.”

“Not by choice.” She tried to project a look of candor, which failed to come off. “I don’t know what happened between
Richard and the dead man. I have no idea what their relationship actually was.”

“I’ve been told your husband was bisexual.”

“Really? This is the first I’ve heard of it.”

“Are you telling me he wasn’t?”

“The question never came up. Why is it so important to you?”

“It may be an essential part of the case.”

“I doubt it. Richard wasn’t a very sexual man at all. He was more excited by his work than he ever was by me.”

She made a doleful mouth and looked at me to measure its effect. For some reason, it made me angrier. I had had enough of the woman and her lies, enough of her truth as well. While I sat trading words with her, a woman I cared about was lost in the dangerous night.

“Do you know where Betty Siddon is?”

She shook her silver head. “I’m afraid I don’t. Has something happened to Betty Jo?”

“She went looking for Mildred Mead and got lost herself. Do you know where I can find Mildred Mead?”

“No. I don’t. She phoned me a few months ago, when she’d just come to town. But I didn’t want to see her. I didn’t want to stir up all the old memories.”

“Then you should never have dug up those bones,” I said.

She swore at me violently, damning me to hell. But the wish rebounded, almost as if she’d meant it for herself in the first place. A gray look of self-loathing dropped like a veil across her face. She covered it with her hands.

“Why did you dig them up?” I said.

She was silent for a while. Then she said behind her hands, “I simply panicked.”

“Why?”

“I was afraid the place would be searched, and I would be blamed for the man’s death.”

She was watching me between her fingers, like a woman behind bars.

“Did somebody threaten you with exposure?”

She didn’t answer. I took this to mean yes. “Who was it, Mrs. Chantry?”

“I’m not sure. She didn’t come here. She phoned me last night and threatened to go to the police with what she knew. I think it was the woman who came here with the little boy the day the man was killed.”

“What did she want from you?”

“Money.” She dropped her hands: her mouth was twisted and her eyes were hard.

“How much?”

“She didn’t specify. A large amount, I gather.”

“When does she want it?”

“Tomorrow. She said she’d call me again tomorrow, and meanwhile I should raise all the money I could.”

“Do you plan to do that?”

“I had planned to. But there’s no point in it now, is there? Unless you and I can come to some arrangement.”

She thrust her hands into her hair and held her head between them, chin high, like a work of art that she was offering for lease or outright sale.

I said, “I’ll do what I can. But you can’t keep Mackendrick out of this. If you can help him to close the case, he’ll be grateful. I think you should get in touch with him right away.”

“No. I need time to think. Will you give me until morning?”

“I will on one condition. Don’t do anything rash.”

“Like run away, you mean?”

“Like kill yourself.”

She shook her head in a short angry movement. “I’m going to stay here and fight. I hope you’ll be on my side.”

I didn’t commit myself. As I got up to leave, the eyes of Chantry’s portraits seemed to be watching me from the shadowed walls.

Mrs. Chantry followed me to the door. “Please don’t judge me harshly. I know I appear to be a wicked person. But I’ve really had very little choice about the things I’ve done, or left undone. My life wasn’t easy even before my husband took off. And since then it’s been a kind of shabby hell.”

“With Rico.”

“Yes. With Rico. I said I had no real choice.”

She was standing close to me, her eyes hooded and calculating, as if she might be getting ready to make another unfortunate choice.

I said, “A young soldier named William Mead was murdered in Arizona over thirty years ago. He was the illegitimate son of Felix Chantry by Mildred Mead—your husband’s half brother.”

She reacted as though I had struck her and she was about to cry out. Her eyebrows rose and her lower lip dropped. For a moment, her face was open. But she didn’t make a sound.

“Your husband left Arizona immediately afterwards, and there was some suspicion that he had killed William Mead. Did he?”

“Certainly not. What reason would he have?”

“I was hoping you could tell me. Weren’t you quite close to William at one time?”

“No. Of course not.”

But there was no conviction in her denial.

^chapter
34

I left her and drove south along the waterfront. The traffic was still fairly heavy. It wasn’t really late, but I was tired. The long indeterminate conversation with Mrs. Chantry had drained my energy.

I passed a hamburger stand that reminded me that I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. I had a couple of hamburgers and some French frieds. Then I checked in at my motel, hoping that Betty might have left a message for me.

She hadn’t. But there was one from Paola Grimes, who
wanted me to call her at the Monte Cristo Hotel. I got the front desk of the hotel after some difficulty.

Paola answered her room phone on the first ring: “Hello?”

“This is Archer.”

“It’s about time.” Her voice was flat and angry. “My mother told me she gave you some money for me. Fifty dollars. I need it. I can’t get out of this flea-trap without it, and my van won’t start, either.”

“I’ll bring you your fifty now. I tried to deliver it earlier.”

“You could have left it at the desk.”

“Not that desk. I’ll see you, Paola.”

I found her waiting for me in the Monte Cristo lobby. She had evidently brushed her hair and washed her face and put on fresh lipstick. But she looked sad and out of place among the night-blooming girls and their followers.

I handed her the fifty dollars. She counted and rolled the bills, and thrust them into her brassiere.

I said, “Will that cover your hotel bill?”

“Up until now I guess it will. I don’t know about tomorrow. The police want me to stick around but they won’t release any of my father’s money. He was carrying quite a lot of money.”

“You’ll get it back, or your mother will.”

“Or my great-grandchildren will,” she said bitterly. “I don’t trust cops and I don’t like this town. I don’t like the people here. They killed my father and I’m afraid they’ll kill me.”

Her fear was contagious. I followed the movements of her eyes and began to see the place as she was seeing it, an anteroom where lost souls waited for a one-night stand that was never going to end.

“Who killed your father?”

She shook her head, and her black hair fell like night around her face. “I don’t want to talk about it. Not here.”

“We could talk in your room.”

“No, thanks.” She gave me a sharp dark paranoid look, like a frightened animal peering out from the cover of her hair.
“The room may be bugged. That’s one reason I can’t stay in it.”

“Who would bug it?”

“Maybe the cops. Maybe the killers. What difference does it make? They’re all in this together.”

“Come out and sit in my car.”

“No, thanks.”

“Then let’s take a walk, Paola.”

Surprisingly she agreed. We went out and joined the people on the sidewalk. Across the road, a line of palms tossed their plumes above the empty booths of the weekly art show. Beyond them the phosphorescent white waves broke and rose and receded as if they had been set the eternal task of marking time and measuring space.

Gradually, as we moved along the sidewalk, Paola became less tense. Our movements seemed to relate to the natural rhythms of the sea. The sky opened out above us, poorly lit by the low sinking moon on the horizon.

Paola touched my arm. “You asked me who killed my father.”

“Yes.”

“You want to know what I think?”

“Tell me what you think.”

“Well, I’ve been going over in my mind everything my father said. You know, he believed that Richard Chantry was alive and staying here in town under a different name. And he thought that Chantry actually painted that picture of Mildred Mead. I thought so, too, when I saw it. I don’t claim to be an expert, like my father, but it looked like a Chantry to me.”

“Are you sure your father’s opinion was honest, Paola? The picture was worth a lot more to him if it was a Chantry.”

“I know that, and so did he. That’s why he did his best to authenticate it. He spent the last days of his life trying to locate Chantry and trace the picture to him. He even looked up Mildred Mead, who is living here in town. She was Chantry’s favorite model, though of course she didn’t actually sit
for that particular portrait. She’s an old woman now.”

“Have you seen her?”

She nodded. “My father took me to see her a couple of days before he was killed. Mildred was a friend of my mother’s in Arizona, and I’ve known her ever since I was a child. My father probably thought that having me there would get her talking. But Mildred didn’t say much the day we visited her.”

“Exactly where was this?”

“She has a little place in a court. She was just moving in. I think it’s called Magnolia Court. There’s a big magnolia tree in the middle of it.”

“In town here?”

“Yes. It’s in the downtown section. She said she took it because she couldn’t do much walking any more. She didn’t talk much, either.”

“Why not?”

“I think she was scared. My father kept pressing her about Richard Chantry. Was he alive or dead? Did he paint that picture? But she didn’t want to talk about him. She said she hadn’t seen him in over thirty years and he was probably dead, and she hoped he was. She sounded very bitter.”

“I’m not surprised. Chantry may have killed her son William.”

“And he may have killed my father, too. My father could have traced the picture to him and got himself killed for his trouble.”

Her voice was low and frightened. She looked around suspiciously at the palms and the low moon, as if they were parts of a shabby stage set hiding the actual jungle life of the world. Her hands grasped at each other and pulled in opposing directions.

“I’ve got to get out of this town. The police say I have to stick around, they need me for a witness. But they’re not even protecting me.”

“Protecting you from what?” I said, though I knew the answer.

“Chantry. Who else? He killed my father—I know that in my bones. But I don’t know who he is or where he is. I don’t
even know what he looks like any more. He could be any man I meet on the street.”

Her voice was rising. Other people on the sidewalk had begun to notice us. We were approaching a restaurant-bar that was spilling jazz through its open front door. I steered her in and sat her at a table. The room was narrow and deep, resembling a tunnel, and the band at its far end was like a train coming.

“I don’t like that music,” she said.

“No matter. You need a drink.”

She shook her dark head. “I can’t drink. Alcohol drives me crazy. It was the same with my father. He told me that was why he went on drugs.” She covered her ears with her hands and closed her eyes. “I’ve got to get out of here.”